He went unsung to his grave

Had it happened to anyone else, there would have been an earthquake of protest. A man is seized on unspecified charges, and whisked off to a court of dubious authority.

Slobodan Milosevic: a victim of Western aggression?

He spends nearly five years in detention. He asks permission to visit a heart specialist, but it is denied. Two weeks later, he dies of heart failure, without having been found guilty of anything.

Had the man in question been, say, a Guantanamo internee, there would have been angry demonstrations, questions in parliament, hectoring editorials in the Guardian. But because it was Slobodan Milosevic, he went to his grave unwept, unhonoured and unsung.

I take the more conventional view that Milosevic was a calculating Commie who unleashed a series of calamities, first upon the other South Slav peoples, then upon the Kosovars, and finally upon the luckless Serbs.

Then again, whether or not Milosevic was a bad man is neither here nor there. Bad men perhaps bad men especially deserve justice. And, as Laughland shows, the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia was a disgusting travesty.

I would call it a kangaroo court, except that kangaroo courts are at least quick and cheap, whereas the ICTY is working its leisurely way through a $200 million a year budget.

Laughland chronicles, in pitiless detail, how the judges crashed through a series of legal norms and conventions in their increasingly frantic attempts to secure a conviction. The court changed its procedures more than 50 times. It allowed hearsay evidence. It repeatedly contradicted itself. And, in an extraordinary step, it silenced the surprisingly eloquent Milosevic by imposing counsel on him.

"So what?" you may say. "Even if it got there irregularly, at least it got to the right result". But did it? We shall never know whether it would have found Milosevic guilty although, at the time of his death, the prosecution was plainly floundering. And whether you admire Milosevic or abominate him, a five year incarceration without issue is surely no one's idea of justice.

In any case, there are bigger issues at stake than Slobbo.

The ICTY represents a revolution in international jurisprudence. For 300 years, the world operated on the basis of territorial jurisdiction: states were responsible for offences committed within their own borders.

But that order is now collapsing: a Spanish court can indict on General Pinochet; publicity-seeking European judges can serve warrants on Ariel Sharon, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell (for some reason they never seem to want to indict, say, Fidel Castro).

Where international law used to concern itself with such matters as maritime rights and safe conduct for emissaries, it now regulates behind-border issues: everything from child labour to the rights of refugees.

Supporters of this growing international corpus of law argue that state sovereignty should not bestow immunity on tyrants. The trouble is that their purgative is worse than the original malady. Yes, some governments are authoritarian, in the sense that their leaders are not answerable to their peoples. But international tribunals, by their nature, cannot be rooted in the democratic process.

How is justice served by substituting one unaccountable ruler for another especially when, in order to overrule the autocrats, you also have to overrule the respectable democracies?

For many human rights lawyers, of course, the unaccountability of the system is precisely its attraction. They worry that, left to themselves, democratic politicians might pass illiberal laws. Surely, they argue, the world is better off if these demagogues are constrained by international rules.

But who is to set these rules? The international lawyers and human rights activists are undoubtedly acting from decent motives, believing themselves to be upholding humane values. But the fact remains that no one has elected them to anything. The world returning to a pre-modern concept of politics, in which law-makers are answerable to their consciences rather than their publics.Â Once we hand them that power, we create the opportunity for a dictatorship far worse than Milosevic's.